The travelers are diverted from Aslan's signs

The travelers are diverted from Aslan’s signs through a temptation that works less by force than by promising relief. The Lady of the Green Kirtle points Jill Pole, Eustace Scrubb, and Puddleglum toward Harfang’s beds, baths, and abundant meals; exhausted, the children let that prospect displace their search for Prince Rilian and their attention to Aslan’s instructions. At the ruined city they discover that their route has carried them across the very sign they needed to read, and that their failure was not simply a matter of the message arriving too late.

The Lady’s invitation

At the end of a bridge, the travelers see two mounted strangers approaching along what appears to be an ancient giant road. The first is an anonymous knight in black armor, his visor lowered, riding a black horse; the second, on a beautiful white horse, is the Lady of the Green Kirtle, dressed in a fluttering green gown. Her appearance is dazzling, and her voice is sweet. Puddleglum nevertheless keeps his guard and warns the others not to move toward the strangers in fear or reveal their business.

When Jill begins to speak, Puddleglum interrupts. He declines to tell the strangers who they are or what they are doing, and asks instead about the weather. The Lady answers his reserve with apparent frankness: she describes Harfang as a place of gentle, courteous giants, says travelers may hear news of the City Ruinous there, and offers warm rooms, soft beds, baths, and four meals a day. The invitation supplies a plausible route toward information about the ruined city while making a comfortable stay seem like an immediate reward.

The decision to go to Harfang

Puddleglum objects that Aslan’s signs never instructed them to stay with giants, and that the word “gentle” does not establish what giants will actually be like. Jill and Eustace, however, are worn down by the journey: they have endured wind and rain, meager roasted fowl, and hard ground for sleeping. Wanting shelter and comfort, they press to visit Harfang. Puddleglum eventually agrees, but requires an absolute promise that they will not tell the giants they come from Narnia or that they are searching for Prince Rilian unless he gives permission. They make the promise and continue toward Harfang.

The hardship of the road reinforces the invitation. The route runs through narrow valleys exposed to a cold north wind, with no firewood or sheltered hollows; the stony ground hurts their feet by day and leaves them sore at night. Against that discomfort, the imagined beds, baths, and hot meals become difficult for the children to set aside. The Lady’s effect is consequently visible in the travelers’ attention: they stop talking about Aslan and the lost prince, and Jill abandons her practice of repeating the signs each morning and evening. What begins as a decision to seek lodging grows into a broader loss of focus, accompanied by increasing self-pity, irritability, and quarrelling with Puddleglum and one another.

The missed city and its inscription

The travelers eventually emerge from the mountains onto a desolate rocky plain. Across it, a low, flat-topped hill appears beneath the gathering dusk; beyond the hill, lights shine from the direction of Harfang. The sight of welcoming windows promises the refuge the children have been longing for, while the ruined city itself remains unread. In the morning, from the castle, Jill can see the hill clearly: its flat top is still largely paved, and the surviving crosswise banks are the remains of walls that may once have belonged to giant palaces and temples. A wall roughly five hundred feet high had looked like a cliff; apparent factory chimneys prove to be enormous broken pillars, with stone fragments at their bases. The ledges on the hill are remnants of giant stairs.

Across the paving, in large dark letters, are the words “UNDER ME.” The inscription makes the hill not merely a ruin encountered along the way, but the next instruction in the search: Puddleglum concludes that they must look for the Prince beneath the city. The phrase’s significance becomes sharper when Eustace reconstructs their route. They had walked inside the letter E in “ME,” following its strokes and turns without recognizing the words beneath their feet. The path they took through the ruin had, in effect, traced the sign they were supposed to read.

Recognition and consequence

The discovery turns the children’s earlier distraction into an acknowledged failure. Eustace says they have missed the second and third signs; Jill initially blames herself and says she has spoiled everything since arriving. She also wonders whether Aslan could have put the lettering there after they had passed. Eustace rejects that comforting possibility: they had seen the inscription by walking through it, and the failure was theirs, not evidence that the instructions appeared too late.

Puddleglum suggests that this may have been exactly what the Lady intended. The travelers now have to hold two things together: they have failed to follow the signs, but the words they overlooked still tell them what to do next. Their detour has not erased the instruction; it has exposed how completely a promised refuge could crowd out the purpose of the journey. The episode makes the signs consequential not as a route that guarantees easy success, but as guidance that must be remembered and interpreted even after the travelers have gone wrong.